Barstow Man Is Charged in ’86 Slaying of Navy Wife

A police task force investigating a series of 45 slayings in San Diego County has charged a Barstow man with murder in the killing of a military wife five years ago.

Elmer Lee Nance, 63, was arrested at a bakery Friday in the San Bernardino County town of Barstow, accused of failing to register as a sex offender. Nance was convicted of molesting a child in 1974.

Nance is charged with killing 22-year-old Nancy Allison White in 1986, after her car broke down on Interstate 8, two miles east of Lake Jennings Road.

Motorcyclists found her nude and strangled body beside a Carlsbad lagoon near Interstate 5 five days after she was last seen. She was identified a week later through dental records.

White’s car broke down on her way home from visiting her husband in El Centro, where he was temporarily assigned to a Marine Corps post. The couple had been celebrating their second wedding anniversary, and White was returning when her Volvo overheated. She pulled over and called her husband.

Milton White, normally stationed at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, told his wife to call a neighbor near their Santa Ana home.

The neighbor arrived to find the car unlocked with the windows rolled down. Nancy White’s purse and luggage were still in the car, law enforcement officials said at the time. Milton White and the neighbor searched the area, but did not find the woman.

Detectives interviewed Nance at the time of White’s disappearance, after witnesses placed him at the scene.

Members of the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, formed in 1988 to investigate a series of slayings that involved mostly prostitutes and transients, began focusing on Nance late last year.

Richard J. Lewis, a deputy district attorney and task force spokesman, declined to discuss evidence that might link Nance to White’s murder, other than to say that investigators had found inconsistencies in some of Nance’s most recent statements to police. Nance is not a suspect in any of the other slayings, Lewis said.

White was the 17th victim in a series of killings that date back to June, 1985, when the body of San Diego police informant and prostitute Donna Gentile was found in East County.

Although White was not a prostitute nor involved in drug trade--two characteristics that link most of the women in the series--the murder was added to the list because White was abducted from I-8, strangled and beaten, as were many of the other victims.

Nance had been tracked for two months between Barstow and Wyoming, and every time task force investigators notified Barstow police that he was in the San Bernardino town, he’d be gone when detectives arrived, said Sgt. Celeb Gibson, head of the detective division for the Barstow police.

“We’ve been chasing him for months,” Gibson said.

Acting on task force information, Barstow police watched Nance leave a rundown downtown motel and drive to a bakery, where he was arrested, Gibson said.

He was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender and turned over to the San Diego County task force. Nance is being held without bail at the downtown County Jail and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Task force investigators have tried to lure Nance back to San Diego by telling him they had some of his property and have even visited Wyoming in search of Nance, Gibson said.

“They have tried every which way to get this guy,” he said.

Of the 45 slayings, the task force has successfully convicted one murder suspect. Alan (Buzzard) Stevens, a former biker, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 1988 death of Cynthia McVey, 26, whose body was discovered in 1988 near an isolated part of the Pala Indian Reservation.

Two weeks ago, the task force arrested Ronald Elliot Porter, a former Escondido auto mechanic, in connection with two murders and the attempted murder of five others. Porter has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is being held without bail.